The present invention relates to a method of generating character patterns and, more particularly, to a method of printing characters on a plotter or printer which prints characters by moving its pen in accordance with a control signal produced by a microprocessor or the like, wherein the amount of data necessary for printing the characters is reduced by a data compression method.
Generally, in printing characters in accordance with the control signals, each character is expressed as a group of straight lines or vectors, and, according to the conventional method, each straight line to be drawn needs two pieces of descriptive data, i.e., a start point and an end point. FIG. 1 shows a flowchart of the conventional method of generating character patterns, in which the coordinates of the start and end points for each straight line are read from a data table according to the ASCII code entered to the printer or plotter and the pen is moved to draw each segment of character in accordance with the two coordinates stored for each line. This prior art method, however, needs data for the start and end points of every straight line, thus using a large amount of data storage when printing a complex character, and therefore the number of character types handled by the printer or plotter is limited due to its finite memory capacity. In addition, handling a large amount of data results in a long processing time, which consequently reduces printing speed.